Departments of service providers take calls from customers for many reasons. Customers may contact a customer service or sales department to place a new order for a service, to request assistance with an existing service, to request maintenance or repair for a service, or to cancel the service. In doing so, a customer service or sales representative must document the telephone call or other interaction that has occurred with the customer.
In some cases, the customer service or sales representative is incapable of handling the particular request that the customer is making. In those cases, the representative of the service provider must use electronic forms to document the request that is then electronically submitted to other departments that are better suited to handle the request.
In cases such as these where electronic forms are utilized to document the interaction with the customer, information is obtained from the customer and the representative manually enters this information into the electronic forms. There may be instances where multiple electronic forms must be completed, such as where one form is dependent upon another form or where one form is used for editing information such as contact information while the other form is used to document the interaction itself and borrows the contact information from the form used for editing.
In such cases, information that is required for completion of one form may also be required for completion of another form relating to the same customer. However, the representative may be required to manually enter the information in one form, and then proceed to the next form where the same information must be manually entered again. While such double-entry of information is time consuming and inefficient, it is also prone to errors where the representative makes a mistake when entering the same information multiple times for multiple forms. The call back number of the customer is one such type of information that must often be entered on multiple forms. The call back number of the customer is particularly burdensome in that it is information that must be requested by the representative, that may change from one interaction with the customer to the next, and that is crucial to effectively handle the request made by the customer.